How to Use Ofunnel to Get Introductions into Your Target Prospects

Relationships are incredibly important for salespeople to be successful. An observation we made early on was that salespeople had no way of knowing when people in their network were connecting to people that they may want to establish a relationship with—so we created OFunnel to help solve this challenge.

We’re honored to be featured by Craig and are excited to share a little about OFunnel with you.

The scenario: The process we are about to describe will follow a sales person who has a set of target accounts to sell to. The first thing you do when you are assigned an account is search LinkedIn to see if you have any 1st or 2nd level connections you can use. The next thing you should do is set up your account in OFunnel to follow accounts and potential contacts so you can know of any new connections that you can leverage immediately to get introduced into the account.

Step 2: Sign in through LinkedIn.

No new user name or password to remember. And this allows OFunnel to keep track of all of the connections being made through your network.

All of the text above is required by LinkedIn. (Ofunnel has no control over it) Most importantly, Ofunnel will NEVER post anything to LinkedIn.

Step 3: Enter the accounts you want to monitor.

Ofunnel starts out with your current company as a sample monitor, but we advise you to change this and set up companies, people and roles that you are interested in. Click on Add New Alert.

We’ll start by taking you through a company example. In this example, I want to be alerted when someone in my network meets someone at Swedish Medical Center. With OFunnel’s 2nd Level Filters we can get more precise than that. In this use case I’m only interested in someone in IT and that is from the Greater Seattle Area. Because there are multiple roles in IT that I’m interested in, I put in a number of roles. Save Changes.

Step 4: Repeat!

If you have more than 5 or 10 accounts, you probably want to upload you accounts a little differently. From my Alerts page you have two additional options for uploading accounts. Also, you can import accounts from a CSV/XLS

or if you are a Salesforce user, you can upload your account list from Salesforce:

Step 5: Receive your daily summary of connections from the last 24 hours

Every day you’ll receive a summary of the connections that have happened in the past 24 hours that meet your criteria. Here’s what one of our connection alerts looks like.

Step 6: Take Action!

Send an email to your 1st level connection to get an introduction OR you may decide to get an introduction through LinkedIn. With OFunnel, now you don’t have to send a cold email or make a cold call.

Other options with Ofunnel:

-Set up alerts for Roles: This is great for recruiters, or for people that don’t have named accounts but always sell to the same role within an organization. There are lots of options for secondary filters, including company size, industry and location.

-Set up alerts based on a specific Person: This is great for competitive intelligence and allows you to see if your competitors are connecting with your clients OR you can see everyone that your competitor is connecting with (if you are connecting with them on LinkedIn).

Today’s Guest Author:

Van Chappell is CoFounder of OFunnel, a company that notifies professionals of connections happening in their network. Van has been in sales for over a dozen years in companies large (Perot Systems) and small (BrandVerity and Health Care DataWorks). Contact Van at van@ofunnel.com or on Twitter at @ofunnel